Business-Driven Architect

Cross posted from SOA Consortium Insights.  Join our conversation!

Last month, I shared some of our Community of Practice's work in flight regarding services, portfolios, management units, and the fit within the overall IT landscape.  At the time, the following diagram best represented our on-going conversation.  [Click on diagram to enlarge]

Along with the diagram, I posed some questions for broader community feedback:

1.  Has your organization's management perspective shifted away from business solutions (applications, business process implementations) to business capabilities/functions?  If so, in which areas: IT funding, IT delivery, IT operations, and/or IT product management?

2. Are you engaging in service portfolio management practices, such as service value prediction and assessment, marketing, sourcing, rationalization, refresh, and retirement?  If so, what techniques and/or tools are you employing?

For example, to manage service sprawl that began from federated service development and was compounded by a merger, one of our members is considering marketplace techniques, both real and predictive, to let developers choose which of a redundant set of services survives, rendering the less popular obsolete.

3.  Who manages the service portfolio?  How does this compare, contrast with the management of the business solution and IT asset portfolios?

Since that post, our group continued its discussion, which is reflected in this updated version of the Services, Portfolios, Management Units & Clouds diagram.  [Click on diagram to enlarge]

The major changes:

1. Explicitly stated a usage relationship between the IT Delivery Value Chains and the Service Portfolio.
2. Assigned management responsibility of the Service Portfolio to the Enterprise Architecture group, and declared that the Service Portfolio is part of the Enterprise Architecture Portfolio. (answered our question #3)
3. Indicated the Business Capability map is one of many Business Architecture Artifacts, and that those Business Architecture Artifacts are managed as part of the Enterprise Architecture Portfolio.
4. Explicitly stated the business-driven relationship between Business Capability criticality and Project Portfolio prioritization.
5. Collapsed the Cloud Service view into the main diagram.
6. Noted the specific management policies at each portfolio, recognizing the need for federated policy administration, communication, and enforcement, or as Todd Biske would say, "governance".

We welcome your feedback on any aspect of our evolved diagram, as well as your thoughts on the following questions. (Question #3 is new)

1.  Has your organization's management perspective shifted away from business solutions (applications, business process implementations) to business capabilities/functions?  If so, in which areas: IT funding, IT delivery, IT operations, and/or IT product management?

2. Are you engaging in service portfolio management practices, such as service value prediction and assessment, marketing, sourcing, rationalization, refresh, and retirement?  If so, what techniques and/or tools are you employing?

For example, to manage service sprawl that began from federated service development and was compounded by a merger, one of our members is considering marketplace techniques, both real and predictive, to let developers choose which of a redundant set of services survives, rendering the less popular obsolete.

3. Is your organization using, or considering, ITIL V3 to manage the full service lifecyle from inception (business architecture) through development/consumption (IT Delivery Value Chains), operations (IT asset and runtime management) and product management (service portfolio management)?

Please share any thoughts on the post, and/or our direct questions, via comment, blog post, or discussion forum.  Just link to this post, we'll find you.

[Disclosure: The SOA Consortium is a client of my firm, Elemental Links]